The Xenophile Historian

1500 to 1765

	Sufis and Sikhs
	The Moguls Ascendant
	Akbar
	The Mogul Zenith
	Sri Lanka: The Kandyan Kingdom and European Intervention
	The Moguls Besieged
	The West Moves In
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Despite the fundamental differences between Hinduism and Islam, some attempts were made to find a common ground between the faiths. One got started before Islam came to India. This was a form of mysticism called Sufism. Islam, as practiced in the Middle East, follows a rigid code of laws that many consider restrictive and unsatisfactory. Some individuals noted that Mohammed got his revelations by meditating in caves, and they tried similar practices, seeking a personal relationship with God. They were called Sufis, because of the suf (wool) robes they wore in imitation of Christian monks. There are hundreds of Sufi orders in Islam today, the most famous being the "Whirling Dervishes" of Turkey; all look to find God through emotional experiences, even if the laws of the Koran have to be thrown away in the process.

Sufism has always been limited to a few very spiritual people in the Middle East, where orthodox Moslems regard it as almost a heresy. However, it got a different reception in India. Often Sufis would form bands of fakirs, preaching the message of the Prophet and going into trances to achieve spiritual union with God. This looked a lot like what the gurus had been practicing for the previous two thousand years, so Hindus readily accepted it. The Hindus came to respect all kinds of Sufis, even (or should I say especially) the fearsome warriors who slaughtered Hindus in battle. When Sufis died and were buried, Hindus and Moslems came to pay their respects, though for different reasons; Moslems regarded the departed Sufis as saints, while Hindus venerated them as gods. Women especially worshiped them because they believed Sufis had the power to cure barrenness. Since most Sufi holy men were buried at religious schools, where Hindus were not allowed to come in, it became a common practice for Hindus to leave flowers and other offerings to the dead hero outside the walls of the schools.

The religious traffic was not all one-way. Around the year 1500 the ideas of two Hindus produced Sikhism. The first was a low-caste weaver from Benares named Kabir (1440-1518), who wrote popular religious poetry. Influenced by Sufism, Kabir stated that there was no need for temples, idols or prophets. God, he taught, was everywhere, and those who know how to look will recognize Him.

Many of Kabir's verses went into the Sikh "Bible," but the real founder was a Punjabi named Nanak (1469-1538). Never satisfied with the Hinduism his family practiced, he became a Sufi. His wanderings in search of the truth took him all over India, to Sri Lanka, and even to Mecca. Finally in 1523 he returned to the Punjab, and there he spent the rest of his life teaching his beliefs.

Nanak subscribed to the Islamic view that there is only one god, but like Kabir he rejected formal modes of worship and denied that any religion had the "one true way" to find God. Virtuous conduct, humility, love, sincerity, justice, modesty, truth and charity are the only things that matter and are more important than any form of worship.

On that foundation Sikhism developed its own unique practices that distinguish it from both Hinduism and Islam. Sikhism evolved its own system of writing, and the city of Amritsar became a holy city after the Sikhs built their main shrine, the Golden Temple, in it. All Sikhs have the surname Singh, meaning "Lion," and the men make themselves conspicuous by wearing beards, turbans, and a dagger (or a dagger-shaped piece of jewelry in places where weapons are prohibited). Most of the order's new members were converts from Hinduism, resulting in the gradual adoption of Hindu customs and an alienation from Islam. The fourth guru after Nanak was executed in 1607 for taking part in an unsuccessful rebellion against the Mogul emperor Jahangir and thus became Sikhism's first martyr. The next gurus transformed Sikhism into a military order, teaching both tactics and theology. In 1699 they founded a sworn brotherhood of fighting Sikhs and launched another rebellion against the Moguls, this time proclaiming to their followers that the surest way to get to Heaven is by dying in battle or killing a Moslem officer.

The Sikhs were the last and toughest opponents of British dominion, but once conquered they became loyal subjects and valued recruits for the Anglo-Indian army. Today the Sikhs number twenty million strong, and in the 1980s made an unsuccessful bid to create a state of their own that would have been independent from both India and Pakistan. It is ironic that Sikhism was founded to unite Hinduism and Islam, but instead created a third religion to further divide Indian society.

The Moguls Ascendant

Babur wandered in search of a home, accompanied by his followers and refugees from the Uzbeks. He found one when he captured the city of Kabul in 1505, but his attempts to recover his Central Asian emirate during the next twenty years got him nowhere. Nor was there much point in invading Persia, which had just come under the rule of a vigorous Shiite group, the Safavids. Finally he turned south and started a new empire for himself in India.

When Babur crossed the Indus, he found out that Lahore, the main city of the Punjab, was in revolt against Ibrahim, the last sultan of Delhi. Babur took Lahore first, then went to meet Ibrahim's army on the plain of Panipat, ten miles north of Delhi, in April 1526. He put the tactics learned during his years of wandering to the test: he dug ditches, made barricades out of branches, lashed together carts to form another defensive position, and picked locations to hide his cavalry, musketeers, and artillery.⁽²⁾ When the big battle finally came, gunfire mowed down Ibrahim's troops. He was killed, his head was brought to Babur, and Babur was declared "Emperor of Hindustan."

Babur had to fight two more battles after this one. The first to dispute his authority was Rana Sana Singh, the leader of the Rajputs; in 1527 he marched to the village of Khandwa, about 40 miles from Agra, with an army many times larger than Babur's. That, coupled with tales of Rajput invincibility, demoralized the Moguls. Babur saved the day by reminding his troops that they were fighting a holy war against infidels; then he proved he was a good Moslem by renouncing wine, a vice he was greatly fond of. Three hundred nobles and troops followed their leader in taking that pledge. The same defensive strategy that had worked at Panipat was used here, and the soldiers fought the Rajputs with desperate courage, knowing that a defeat would be the end of everything for them. They prevailed, and though Rana Sana Singh escaped, he died of his wounds before the year was over. One month later Babur defeated Ibrahim's brother Mahmud, on the banks of the Ganges, and his domain rested easy at last.

Because of his mountaineer background, Babur detested the climate and customs of India and only accepted his new role because it was Allah's will. He wrote that the people were unattractive, dull-witted, and without any skill in mechanics or architecture. Moreover, India lacked all the good things he missed from his Central Asian home: good horses, good meat, good bread, good fruits, ice water, baths, and even candles. During the monsoon season the rains ruined bows, armor, books, clothes and furniture; during the dry season the air was full of choking dust. India's only good qualities were its vast manpower and wealth.

His troops felt the same way and they pleaded to plunder the land and return to Kabul, but Babur was more successful than Alexander had been when it came to changing their minds. Now that they had won an empire through great hardship and battle, he argued, going back to Kabul would be shameful. He offered anyone who wished the opportunity to go, but the person who did would never again be his friend. The troops reluctantly chose to stay with him.

Besides being a soldier, Babur was a man of culture, a remarkable trait when one considers his ancestry. His memoirs are still considered one of the best works of Indian literature ever produced. He wrote poetry in Persian and laid out gardens in the cities he conquered. When he died in 1530 he was first buried in Agra, but later, according to his wishes, his body was taken to Kabul and reburied in a roofless garden tomb that was open to the snow, wind and rain.

Babur left his son Humayun with an empire that was insecure, poorly organized and broke. Humayun's three brothers constantly plotted, and two enemies also threatened him: Bahadur Shah of Gujarat and an Afghan chief named Sher Khan on the Ganges. He attacked and defeated both of them, but then celebrated his victory with weeks of feasting, wine, opium, and all the luxuries of his harem. One of Humayun's disloyal brothers allowed Bahadur to return (he had been hiding in the Portuguese port of Diu), and another proclaimed himself emperor at Agra. Returning to deal with this rebellion, Humayun was cut off by Sher Khan. The Mogul army was driven into the Ganges River, and Humayun himself escaped only because a water carrier lent him an inflated animal skin to cross the river with. Humayun and Sher Khan, who now called himself Sher Shah, had a rematch in the following year (1540); again Sher Shah was victorious. Humayun fled to Lahore, with Sher Shah in pursuit. At Lahore he sent a letter saying, "What justice is there in this? I have left you the whole of Hindustan. Leave Lahore alone and let Sirhind, where you are, be a boundary between you and me." Sher Shah replied, "I have left you Kabul. You should go there."

The emperor, however, did not even have this, because his third brother in Kabul refused to offer him asylum. When Sher Shah closed in, he abandoned Lahore and fled to the deserts of Sind. Not feeling safe even there, he went to Persia in 1543. It looked like the Mogul Empire had been lost forever.

Akbar

Akbar was a multi-talented, headstrong and precocious child, who was only thirteen years old when the throne passed to him. He was already a fearless warrior, who had seen action under Humayun and his wise general, Bayram Khan. In peacetime he kept in shape by hunting. He also had an excellent memory, and was quite a thinker, but remarkably, he never learned to read or write.

The empire's future did not look good at the beginning of Akbar's reign. He was fighting the Afghans in the Punjab when he learned of his father's death, so that in effect he controlled almost nothing beyond the battlefield. A Hindu rebel named Himu captured Delhi and raised an army of 100,000 men and 1,500 elephants to oppose Akbar, who only had 20,000 men. Going against the advice of all the councillors, Bayram Khan proposed gambling everything on a confrontation with Himu, and Akbar enthusiastically went along with the idea. The two forces met at Panipat, the site of Babur's big battle thirty years earlier. The Moguls were all but swamped by the vast Hindu army, but during the final charge, Himu was killed by an arrow that struck him in the eye and went all the way through his head. His army broke up in panic, Delhi was recovered and Mogul authority was restored.

Bayram Khan ran the realm for the next five years, while Akbar was growing up. When Akbar's foster mother, Maham Anga, and the other women of the harem accused him of wanting the throne for himself, the statesman removed himself from the scene by making a pilgrimage to Mecca. En route, a gang of Afghans assassinated him in Gujarat. Now the harem became the power behind the throne. They went too far, though, when Maham Anga's son, Adham Khan, killed the new prime minister just a year later (1562), presumably to take over his job. Akbar was so enraged that he punched Adham Khan in the face, knocking him unconscious; then he ordered the troublemaker thrown off the top of the palace. When he was found still breathing, Akbar had him brought up and thrown down again. Akbar himself broke the news to Maham Anga, who said, "You did well," but she died of grief forty days later. After that, Akbar made sure that family and friends never compromised his rule again.

The next seventeen years were ones of constant military activity. Before the first year was over, Akbar visited a Rajput chief, married his daughter, and recruited the rest of the Rajputs into the Mogul hierarchy. This was something no other Moslem leader had done, and by making the Rajputs his friends, he made the empire more stable than any other Moslem state in Indian history. Together the Moguls and Rajputs conquered Gujarat, the Vindhya mts., the entire Ganges valley, and Bengal, unifying the whole northern half of the subcontinent. While he was winning one battle in 1569, his future heir, Jahangir, was born in a village about 25 miles west of Agra. Akbar celebrated both the birth and the victory by turning the village into a beautiful new city, built completely out of red sandstone. Akbar called his creation Fatehpur Sikri, the "City of Victory," and it became his new capital, but only for a decade; in the 1580s the water supply failed and the whole complex was abandoned.

As Akbar grew older, religion became his favorite intellectual pursuit. His toleration of non-Moslems increased, until he had completely thrown out the idea that India should be a Moslem state. He abolished, at a great cost to the treasury, the discriminatory taxes placed upon non-Moslems, which the Koran had sanctioned. In his personal habits, he came to look more like a Hindu than a Moslem; he sometimes wore Hindu dress with a Rajput-style turban and put a caste mark on his forehead. He even began avoiding meat, remarking that he disliked making his body "a tomb for beasts."

At Fatehpur Sikri, he constructed a building that he called the House of Worship, but it was really a debating hall. Moslem, Hindu, Jain and Parsee theologians were invited to come and discuss what they believed. He even invited Jesuit missionaries from Goa, but to their dismay, he refused to become a Christian because that would have meant putting away all but one of his wives.⁽³⁾ In 1582 he announced that he had created a new religion. Dubbed the Divine Faith, it combined Hindu, Christian and Moslem doctrines. Akbar never converted more than a handful of people at his court, and after his death, the Divine Faith was quietly forgotten.

During the last two decades, a new series of campaigns made the empire even larger. The final subjugation of Sind, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir took place, and an agreement with the Uzbeks made the Hindu Kush mts. the frontier between India and Central Asia. In the east, he conquered Orissa. Finally Akbar entered the Deccan, but a fearless warrior queen, Chand Bibi, defeated his two attempts to take the nearest state, Ahmadnagar; because of her Ahmadnagar did not fall into Mogul hands until both Akbar and Chand Bibi were dead and gone.

The Mogul Zenith

Jahangir's son Shah Jehan (1627-58) did not allow the construction of new Hindu temples, but overall he was not an oppressive ruler. In 1632 he destroyed the Portuguese outpost of Hooghly, in the Ganges delta, because the Portuguese indulged in piracy and stole two slave girls belonging to the Moguls. They were forced to return the slaves and pay a fine, but 400 of them were taken to Agra, imprisoned, and later executed when they refused to embrace Islam. Agra is also noted as the site of the Taj Mahal, a magnificent tomb Shah Jehan built for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child.

Shah Jehan fell ill in 1657, and rumors spread that he was dead. He executed a will leaving the empire to his eldest son, Dara. The other sons, Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad, were grown men, the governors of provinces, and they decided to fight for the throne. The first battle, between Dara and Shuja, forced Shuja to retreat to his base province, Bengal. In response to this Murad and Aurangzeb joined their forces, and together they inflicted two defeats on Dara. The humiliated Dara fled to Agra, then to Delhi, Lahore, Gujarat and Rajastan; after a third battle he was captured on the northwest frontier and executed on a trumped-up charge of heresy. By this time Aurangzeb had also disposed of Murad and sent Shuja fleeing to the Southeast Asian state of Arakan, where he was killed in a native riot. With no other contenders left, Aurangzeb crowned himself emperor and imprisoned Shah Jehan, keeping his father confined until his death in 1666.

Now Aurangzeb deliberately reversed the policy of tolerance practiced by his predecessors. In his personal life he strictly followed the Koran and expected all others to do the same. Drinking, gambling, and even music were outlawed. He imposed new taxes on non-Moslems and saddled them with various other disabilities. In 1669 he decreed the demolition of all Hindu schools and temples, frequently replacing them with mosques. Moslem apostates, including Shiites and Sufis, were arrested, tried, and executed. The Ulema (judges) now tolerated no deviations from the commands of the Prophet, for at last they had a ruler who would back them to the hilt.

These persecutions violated not only the principle of coexistence, but also common sense. Revolts broke out wherever Mogul troops were not present. In the Punjab the Sikhs now rebelled constantly. A few miles from Bombay a prince named Shivaji Bhonsle declared independence from Mogul tyranny in 1647, calling his min-state Maharashtra; he also built a navy to check the growing European influence along the coast. Aurangzeb's ablest general, Jai Singh, forced Shivaji to surrender in 1665, and sent his son as a "representative" (hostage) to the Mogul court. Later Shivaji also went, but his discovery that the Moguls considered him an inferior, rather than an equal, caused him to make such a scene that he was placed under house arrest. He escaped from that by hiding in a fruit basket, and in 1670 he began a guerrilla was that continued beyond his death in 1680.

Aurangzeb's greatest folly was to alienate the Rajputs, who had supplied the empire with valued civil servants and soldiers since the time of Akbar. When they revolted in 1679, the emperor's own son, also named Akbar, commanded the army sent to put them down. Akbar protested strongly against making enemies of such a race of heroes and finally switched sides in an attempt to stop the campaign by overthrowing his father. Yet even the desertion of a favorite son could not stop a fanatic like Aurangzeb.

Despite all these problems, Aurangzeb went ahead and finished the conquest of the peninsula that Akbar had started. In 1661 he conquered Assam, but only temporarily. Then he spent four years assembling a vast host and supplies for an invasion of the Deccan, which began in 1681. Aurangzeb spent the next 24 years as that army's commander-in-chief, and wherever they camped they formed a vast tent city 30 miles in circumference. Aurangzeb was successful, but not against Shivaji's successors, who were now called the Marathas. What Aurangzeb used was overwhelming force to grind down the dying sultanates of south India, who had recently been crippled by raids from the Maratha forts scattered all over the countryside. With the last conquest complete in 1688, Aurangzeb could claim he was master of the entire subcontinent from Afghanistan to the southern tip. Nevertheless, it was a hollow boast.

By bringing the Mogul empire to its peak, Aurangzeb had also exhausted it. The accumulated wealth of his predecessors had been spent on fighting wars, while the rebels were disrupting the economy and sharply reducing the revenues of the government. The costs of the Deccan campaign, Aurangzeb's persecutions and the rebellions were combining with disastrous effects. In response, the now elderly Aurangzeb tried to put down the most dangerous rebels, the Marathas, by capturing their forts one by one, only to have the abandoned forts retaken by the enemy when the Moguls moved on. In 1705, too old and ill to continue and perhaps aware that the Deccan was to become the grave of both his reputation and his body, Aurangzeb went north to Ahmadnagar. He died there in 1707, at the age of 89.

Sri Lanka: The Kandyan Kingdom and European Intervention

In 1521 the three sons of Vijayabahu VI, the king of Kotte, killed their father and partitioned the kingdom between themselves to form three smaller states: Kotte, Sitawake, and Rayigama. Mayadunne, the king of Sitawake, soon decided that one third was not enough and tried to expand his portion at the expense of his eldest brother, Bhuvanaika Bahu of Kotte. Bhuvanaika Bahu responded by calling in the Portuguese, and Mayadunne in turn allied himself with the Zamorin of Calicut, a proven enemy of the Europeans.

Bhuvanaika Bahu was succeeded by his grandson Dharmapala, who was even more dependent on Portuguese support. Franciscans had educated him; in 1557 he announced his conversion to Christianity. That act made him a puppet in Sinhalese eyes and turned Mayadunne into a nationalist; the shift in public opinion allowed Mayadunne to annex a large part of the Kotte kingdom. After his death, his son Rajasinha continued the war successfully on land, though like his father he had no way to combat Portuguese sea power.

On the northern end of the island, a Portuguese raid on Jaffna in 1560 captured a king's ransom in treasure (including possibly the Tooth of the Buddha), but otherwise had no long-term effects. A second invasion in 1591 put a pro-Portuguese ruler on the Tamil throne. Disputes over his legitimacy, however, would continue.

Rajasinha invaded the central highlands in 1580, occupying the previously insignificant city-state of Kandy. Kandy's ruler took refuge with the Portuguese, and in 1591 they took his heir, Dom Philip, with them on an expedition to recover his kingdom. Dom Philip was installed as king but died under mysterious circumstances. His second-in-command, an ambitious and distinguished military noble named Konnappu Bandara, enthroned himself immediately, declaring independence from the Portuguese and changing his name to Vimala Dharma Surya. Not long after that Rajasinha also died (1593), and Sitawake disintegrated because it had no strong successor. That left Kandy as the only remaining independent Sinhalese kingdom. The Portuguese wanted a Kandyan ruler who was on their side, so in 1594 they launched another expedition, this time to enthrone Dona Catherina, a baptized Sinhalese noblewoman. Popular hostility soon built up against the Portuguese soldiers, and Vimala Dharma Surya used guerrilla tactics to rout them. He captured Dona Catherina, made her his queen, and forced the Portuguese to admit that he was a legitimate monarch.

In 1580 Dharmapala was persuaded to deed Kotte to the Portuguese; with his death in 1597 they took formal possession of the western kingdom. Meanwhile on the Tamil front, continued unrest and succession disputes made the Portuguese undertake a third expedition against Jaffna, and they annexed that kingdom in 1619.

The Portuguese were now in possession of the whole island except Kandy and the southeast coast. Vimala Dharma Surya realized that he needed a navy to stop the Portuguese offensive. He got it when the Dutch started sending ships into the Indian Ocean. The first Dutch envoy, Joris van Spilbergen, met the king in 1602 and made lavish promises of military assistance. When the next Dutch fleet arrived a few months later, its commander, Sebald de Weert, decided to attack the Portuguese. However, a misunderstanding caused a fight between the Kandyans and the Dutch instead; de Weert and his men were killed.

The next king of Kandy, Senarat (1604-35), also tried to gain Dutch support. He gave them many commercial concessions and a harbor on the east coast in return for a promise of aid if the Portuguese attacked. When he called on them for help, though, the Dutch were busy fighting both Portugal and Spain elsewhere, so Senarat turned to the Danes. A Danish expedition arrived in May 1620, but it was too late to be useful; Senarat had already made peace with the Portuguese. The truce lasted for ten years. In 1630 the Kandyans attacked the Portuguese again, putting Columbo and the southern town of Galle under siege. Again the absence of sea power hindered Kandy, and they had to conclude another peace agreement in 1634.

When Rajasinha II became king in 1635, the Dutch were firmly established on Java and now had ships and men to spare for Sri Lanka. The king sent emissaries to the nearest Dutch admiral, Adam Westerwolt, who was then blockading Goa. In 1638 the fleet came to Sri Lanka and captured Batticaloa on the east coast from the Portuguese. Then Westerwolt and Rajasinha signed a treaty, which made Kandy pay the cost of fighting the Portuguese and gave the Dutch a near-monopoly on Sri Lankan cinnamon. Working their way in both directions along the coast, the Dutch and Kandyans evicted the Portuguese from the east and south, taking their forts one by one. Differences arose, though, when the Dutch refused to hand over the forts they had captured until their expenses were paid in full. Another problem was a truce declared in Europe in 1640, ending the war between the Netherlands and the two Iberian powers. The peace and occupation strained relations between Kandy and the Dutch, resulting in a fruitless war between them (1645-9). After this the Dutch agreed to hand over some land but continued to delay because the king owed them too much.

The truce with Portugal expired in 1652, and the combatants resumed the war where they had left off. Again the Portuguese lost ground steadily. Rajasinha wanted to attack Columbo, but the Dutch refused to let him do it until he allowed a Dutch fleet to participate. The siege of the Portuguese capital began in August 1655 and lasted for nine months; when the Portuguese surrendered they did so to the Dutch only, and the Kandyans were shut out of the city. Requests to hand over Columbo got evasive replies. Furious, Rajasinha destroyed the lands around Columbo, removed the inhabitants, and returned to his mountain kingdom in the interior.

The Dutch finished the war without Kandy's involvement in 1658, by conquering the strongholds in the north. They now replaced the Portuguese as masters of coastal Sri Lanka.

The Dutch ran Sri Lanka in much the same way that they ran Indonesia--like a business--not surprising since the Dutch governing authority was itself a business (the Dutch East India Company). Sri Lanka provided the company with cinnamon, elephants, pearls and rice, and the Dutch did whatever they could to make these exports as profitable as possible.

The French revolution brought the Netherlands under French rule, and ended Dutch rule on Sri Lanka. From their bases in India, France's archenemy, Great Britain, invaded Sri Lanka; after halfhearted resistance, the Dutch surrendered the island in 1796. At first the British expected to give back their conquest upon the war's end, but they soon changed their minds. In 1802 the island they called Ceylon was declared a Crown Colony of Great Britain.

Before long, the British also decided that Kandy's independence was going to cause problems: the frontier with Kandy was long and expensive to guard; trade between the coastal cities and the interior was hampered by customs posts and local politics; communications between different parts of the island would be easier if they could build roads through the middle. The advantages of a unified Sri Lanka were obvious, but unification could not take place while Kandy distrusted all foreigners. Between 1803 and 1815 struggles for the Kandyan throne caused that kingdom to break up, and the British intervened to put friendly Kandyan chiefs in charge of what was left. Kandy was administered separately, but the unmistakable decline in influence of both the local chiefs and Buddhism led to an anti-British rebellion in 1818. After it was suppressed, Britain integrated the Kandyan kingdom with their colony, bring the whole island under direct rule.

The Moguls Besieged

The next Moguls were utterly incapable of managing the empire's affairs. Whereas Aurangzeb had enjoyed a long reign of 49 years, at least eight of his inept successors rose and fell from the throne during the half century afterwards. Civil wars between them hastened the empire's disintegration. From 1720 onward the governor of the Deccan was effectively an independent ruler, since the Moguls were no longer able to send him aid or even communicate with the south effectively. Oudh (modern Uttar Pradesh) came under the rule of a Shiite dynasty in 1722. The Marathas occupied the land between their forts, and expanded in all directions. In 1728 they moved into Gujarat; three years later they overran Malwa and started raiding the neighborhood of Delhi itself.

Now the Marathas replaced the Moguls as the most powerful government in India. They were not a true nation, though, but a union of five clans, with their capital at Poona near Bombay. The Peshwa or prime minister of Poona was, in theory, the leader of the confederacy; in practice, the clans never gave him much power. The confederacy's borders changed constantly, but most of the time the Marathas ruled most of central and the western half of south India.

The Mogul government became so weak that the Persians invaded north India in 1738-9. The new Persian leader, Nadir Shah, conquered Afghanistan, overran Lahore, and finally took Delhi. He went home with a fabulous treasure: 700 million rupees and all kinds of valuable articles, including the famous Peacock Throne of Shah Jehan. Not long after this (1742) a Mogul-Maratha fight over Bengal and Orissa left those provinces independent of outside rule. The Mogul empire never recovered from these blows, and it became a puppet state defended by the Marathas after this.

In 1747 Nadir Shah died, and one of his lieutenants, Ahmad Shah Durrani (1747-73), proclaimed Afghanistan an independent state with himself in charge of it. During the next twelve years he made four raids into north India. The Marathas ignored him at first, but on the fourth raid (1757), he sacked Delhi. As he returned home they stepped in and occupied all of the Punjab. The Marathas were now at their zenith, and they claimed that the whole subcontinent was under their control, without realizing how uncertain their control was in many areas.

Shocked by the Maratha aggressiveness, Ahmad Shah Durrani returned in 1759. He recovered Lahore easily, but the Mogul emperor was assassinated before Ahmad reached Delhi. The Mogul crown was offered to him, but he refused, instead giving it to the Mogul prince of his choice, Shah Alam II. The Marathas protested this act of kingmaking without their permission, causing a war between the Afghans and Marathas for control of Delhi. After several inconclusive skirmishes, the two antagonists met for a decisive battle at Panipat in January 1761. The Maratha army, which had suffered for two months from lack of food and equipment, was completely routed.

Despite his victory, Ahmad Shah Durrani did not to want to rule India, and he immediately returned to Kabul with his troops, leaving behind a loyal minister to administer Delhi. With the Marathas shattered, there was now a power vacuum in the north. The long-term result of the third battle of Panipat was that it cleared the way for the British to get involved in Indian affairs. Already they were making and unmaking nawabs (rulers) in the east; before long Oudh and the Moguls would also fall under British domination. Officially the Mogul Empire lasted until 1857, but for the last century of its existence it only controlled Delhi and a small area around it.

The West Moves In

The first missionaries to work in India were the Jesuits, who started arriving in large numbers in the 1540s. These clergymen, who were as well-educated as they were zealous, tried to advance Christianity by studying local religious practices and using them to spread the gospel. They did this in China and Japan, but in India this adaptation went further than elsewhere. Jesuits dressed as Brahmans and used Hindu terminology. They gained many nominal Christians this way, but missionaries from other orders rightly complained that this form of Christianity, which accepted many pagan practices, was little more than another Hindu sect. Ultimately the Jesuits were suppressed, but they and their successors created a significant Christian community that still exists in south India today.

Over time greed turned out to be a more powerful motive for bringing Westerners to that hot climate. At first Portugal had a monopoly on the African and Asian trade, but after 1550 the Portuguese Empire went into a definite decline. The main reason for the tailspin was the mother country's size: Portugal had about one and a half million people, not enough to support commitments in Brazil, Africa and Asia all at once. The lack of workers was made up by filling Portuguese ships with sailors from other countries. These sailors went home with stories of Portuguese weakness and valuable navigational information. Nobody even gave the Portuguese much attention after other European powers arrived in India, though their outpost at Goa managed to hold out until 1961.

The competitors who replaced the Portuguese after 1600 were the Dutch and English East India Companies, businesses that enjoyed monopoly rights on the trade between Asia and their respective homelands. They established fortified trading posts as the Portuguese had done, and trained Indian soldiers, called sepoys, to supplement the small military garrisons at each fort. In 1664 the French founded their own corporation, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, which made France a third contender in India.

Unlike the Portuguese, these traders had no burning desire to spread Christianity; in fact, they thought too much missionary activity would be bad for business. The English, for example, were not motivated to send missionaries until the time of John Wesley's evangelical revival (late 18th century). Only in 1813 was the British East India Company compelled to admit missionaries as a condition for the renewal of its charter. Always aware of its precarious position on the coast, the company moved cautiously, carefully building up a network of peaceful trading posts. Sir Thomas Roe negotiated with the Mogul emperor Jahangir to build the first one (Surat) in 1612. The future city of Madras, one of British India's three great ports, was founded in 1640. Bombay came to the company in 1668, as part of the dowry King Charles II got from his Portuguese bride. In 1681 the Mogul emperor Aurangzeb granted permission to build an outpost in one of Bengal's malarial swamps; that became Calcutta, "the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent City of Dreadful Night," as Rudyard Kipling would one day call it.

As the Mogul Empire withered away, Western ambitions grew. By this time the Dutch had been persuaded to look for more profitable markets elsewhere. The British and the French, however, were determined to stay. Those two powers were bitter rivals in those days, and it was inevitable that their quarrels in other places would spread to India. This first happened during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-8), when Britain and France supported opposing sides in that central European conflict, and as a result, fought some inconclusive battles between their Indian outposts. Following that, an enterprising agent of the French East India Company, Francois Dupleix, started getting involved in Indian politics to further the cause of France.

Dupleix proved that a small, well-trained, well-equipped and ably led European force could defeat the hordes of any Indian ruler. He placed his puppets on the thrones of Indian states and added their resources to his own. Soon he was the most powerful man in all of southeastern India, and the British East India Company was forced to enter Indian politics just to survive.

Neither the French company nor the French government supported Dupleix, and in 1754 they recalled him in disgrace. Two years later the Seven Years War (1756-63) broke out. The French encouraged the nawab of Bengal to attack the British port of Calcutta⁽⁵⁾, but the British had a more than capable leader in Robert Clive. At the battle of Plassey in 1757, Clive, commanding a total force of 3,000 men (950 Englishmen plus sepoys), won an astonishing victory against Bengal's army of 50,000 infantry and 18,000 cavalry. Clive's casualties were 22 killed and 49 wounded! Clive replaced the nawab with a governor of his own choice; a few years later he dispensed with the puppet show and became governor himself. After that the British captured the French ports one by one. With the taking of Pondicherry in 1761, France's Indian ambitions ended. The Afghans defeated the Marathas at the third battle of Panipat in the same year, so now the British were the strongest military force in India. Following the battle of Buxar (1764), the upper Ganges state of Oudh also came under British protection.

2. The cannon came from the Ottoman Turks; this was the first time they were used in India.

3. He had married dozens of princesses to cement alliances with their fathers/brothers, and since those alliances held the state together, it would have been political suicide to divorce the harem.

4. After this the city of Kandahar became a source of contention between the Moguls and the Persians, with the Persians winning more often than not.

5. This led to the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta incident, where the British prisoners were stuffed into a small dungeon cell and left to suffocate overnight.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball